A week in Mexico City on $19 a day taught me the hostel kitchen is the real hack
I ate street tacos for lunch and cooked big pots of rice and beans at the hostel every night, and my whole food bill for 7 days came to $31, so has anyone else found that one shared kitchen beats hunting for cheap restaurants?
Cook at the hostel and you start seeing the same trick everywhere, like how buying a coffee maker paid for itself in two weeks or how a library card beats paying for books. The common thread is that the big costs in life are rarely the thing itself, they are the small charges you pay over and over without noticing. A shared kitchen just makes that math impossible to ignore.